🌅 Today’s stat: $13,000

Author

Sunrise Stat
January 24, 2025

$13,000/hour - The amount of unpaid taxes the IRS finds each hour it spends auditing households that make $10 million or more per year
SOURCE
WHAT TO KNOW

  • The massive return on investment underscores the effectiveness of auditing high-income households, which have enjoyed years of declining scrutiny. In 2011, the IRS audited 7.2% of million-dollar earners; by 2019, the audit rate was down to just 0.7%.

WHY IT MATTERS

  • The tax gap—the difference between the amount of taxes that are owed and the amount actually collected—totals around $600 billion annually, translating to about $7 trillion of lost tax revenue over the next decade. The gap also skews toward wealthy households, with more than half (53%) of the yearly total coming from the top 5% of taxpayers by income and nearly a third (28%) coming from the top 1%.

CONNECT THE DOTS

  • The increased audits of wealthy households and large return on investment was made possible by additional funding the IRS received from former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act ($80 billion over the next 10 years). Despite the success, Congress has already clawed back $40 billion of that funding over the past two years.